Relationship Anarchy: Is The Polyamory Community Where Revolutionary Anarchist Politics Went to Die?
This starts as a small annoyance and turns into an argument. Hunting for anarchism podcasts while organizing a relationship anarchy conference, the writer kept finding relationship anarchy by polyamorists and almost nothing about anarchism itself. The essay is careful about what it isn't accusing anyone of. Plenty of relationship anarchists genuinely refuse to rank romantic partners above friends or chosen family. The problem is that for many of them the critique of hierarchy stops at their own relationships and never reaches the workplace, the police, the prison, or the state. The distinction comes down to two sentences that sound alike and aren't. 'I choose not to organize my relationships hierarchically' is a personal practice. 'Hierarchy is domination and should be challenged wherever it appears' is anarchist politics. The slide from the second to the first gets read here as a very old Western habit: the Enlightenment announcing universal equality while European empires expanded, the American Revolution declaring all people equal while keeping slavery legal. Then the history goes back into the word. Proudhon claiming the label in 1840, when anarchy still meant chaos to almost everyone. The Haymarket anarchists hanged after the 1886 bombing in Chicago. The Spanish Revolution of 1936, crushed by Franco and then by Stalinists in Barcelona. People were executed over this, which is why borrowing the vocabulary while defending hierarchy reads as grotesque. It doesn't end by telling anyone to drop the term. Andie Nordgren, who co-coined relationship anarchy, said the deliberately less political framing was meant as a doorway into anarchism. The verdict here is that the door got built and mostly nobody walked through. Emma Goldman does the closing work: after watching Bolshevik Russia turn its violence on anarchists too, she decided that a revolution leaving domination intact in our closest relationships isn't one. Hence the conference, billed pointedly as the first relationship anarchy conference with actual anarchist speakers.
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